The present invention relates to a system and method for manufacturing processing a food product.
It is known to produce large quantities of a food product by forming the food product in a mold, then (for certain food products) partially or fully cooking the food product, and then slicing the food product into desired portions or quantities. Such food products included, for example, meat, sausage, ham, cheese and the like.
Devices and methods are generally known for slicing such food products. For example, a cutting apparatus or slicer cuts the products into slices and then transports the sliced portions away for further processing (e.g., packaging) from a collection area adjacent to the slicing apparatus. Some known devices move one or more elongated segments of the food product (e.g., “logs” or “loaves”) through similarly shaped apertures in a cutting head to be sliced by a blade. These food product logs typically have circular, rectangular, or semi-circular cross-sections.
However, such food products are not configured for improving efficiency of the slicing operation. For example, the amount of food product sliced per movement (e.g., rotation) of the blade is a metric representative of the efficiency and costs associate with the food manufacturing operation. The known cross-sections leave an undesirable amount of area unoccupied by food products. Accordingly, it would be advantageous to provide a slicing operation that slices more food product per movement of the blade to improve efficiency and reduces costs. It would also be advantageous to provide the food product in a shape that more efficiently uses the space available to be cut (i.e., occupies most of the cutting zone). It would be desirable to provide for a food product processing method and apparatus having one or more of these or other advantageous features. To provide an inexpensive, reliable, and widely adaptable food product processing method and apparatus that avoids the above-referenced and other problems would represent a significant advance in the art.